Confidence Interval Estimation of Predictive Performance in the Context of AutoML

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Main Authors: Paraschakis, Konstantinos, Castellani, Andrea, Borboudakis, Giorgos, Tsamardinos, Ioannis
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Paraschakis, Konstantinos
Castellani, Andrea
Borboudakis, Giorgos
Tsamardinos, Ioannis
author_facet Paraschakis, Konstantinos
Castellani, Andrea
Borboudakis, Giorgos
Tsamardinos, Ioannis
contents Any supervised machine learning analysis is required to provide an estimate of the out-of-sample predictive performance. However, it is imperative to also provide a quantification of the uncertainty of this performance in the form of a confidence or credible interval (CI) and not just a point estimate. In an AutoML setting, estimating the CI is challenging due to the ``winner's curse", i.e., the bias of estimation due to cross-validating several machine learning pipelines and selecting the winning one. In this work, we perform a comparative evaluation of 9 state-of-the-art methods and variants in CI estimation in an AutoML setting on a corpus of real and simulated datasets. The methods are compared in terms of inclusion percentage (does a 95\% CI include the true performance at least 95\% of the time), CI tightness (tighter CIs are preferable as being more informative), and execution time. The evaluation is the first one that covers most, if not all, such methods and extends previous work to imbalanced and small-sample tasks. In addition, we present a variant, called BBC-F, of an existing method (the Bootstrap Bias Correction, or BBC) that maintains the statistical properties of the BBC but is more computationally efficient. The results support that BBC-F and BBC dominate the other methods in all metrics measured.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_08099
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Confidence Interval Estimation of Predictive Performance in the Context of AutoML
Paraschakis, Konstantinos
Castellani, Andrea
Borboudakis, Giorgos
Tsamardinos, Ioannis
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Emerging Technologies
Any supervised machine learning analysis is required to provide an estimate of the out-of-sample predictive performance. However, it is imperative to also provide a quantification of the uncertainty of this performance in the form of a confidence or credible interval (CI) and not just a point estimate. In an AutoML setting, estimating the CI is challenging due to the ``winner's curse", i.e., the bias of estimation due to cross-validating several machine learning pipelines and selecting the winning one. In this work, we perform a comparative evaluation of 9 state-of-the-art methods and variants in CI estimation in an AutoML setting on a corpus of real and simulated datasets. The methods are compared in terms of inclusion percentage (does a 95\% CI include the true performance at least 95\% of the time), CI tightness (tighter CIs are preferable as being more informative), and execution time. The evaluation is the first one that covers most, if not all, such methods and extends previous work to imbalanced and small-sample tasks. In addition, we present a variant, called BBC-F, of an existing method (the Bootstrap Bias Correction, or BBC) that maintains the statistical properties of the BBC but is more computationally efficient. The results support that BBC-F and BBC dominate the other methods in all metrics measured.
title Confidence Interval Estimation of Predictive Performance in the Context of AutoML
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Emerging Technologies
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.08099